I decided to give packagekit a try to to see if was as good as one might expect, using the AUR repository of Arch Linux, and installed packagekit and gnome-packagekit. (Yes there are gui package managers for Arch.)

In the first place it looks very good , also its easy to use and its blazingly fast (On my box).

Here is some explanation about Packagekit , and it looks like packagekit does not try replace your tools, but I expect that soon Synaptic will look like Gnome-Packagekit, and Packagekit-QT will become the default gui for KDE.

Linux distributions take their first steps into uniformity, starting with packagemanagement, and I think that is good news.